\n A Brussels court on Thursday found a Belgian jihadist -- presumed killed in a 2016 airstrike -- guilty of genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria.\n<\/p>\n
\n Sammy Djedou, a former fighter with the Islamic State (IS) group, was reported by the Pentagon to have been killed in Raqqa, Syria.\n<\/p>\n
\n Belgian authorities never received formal confirmation of his death, and opted to prosecute him in absentia, in the country's first trial related to mass crimes against the Yazidis.\n<\/p>\n
\n Djedou, previously convicted in absentia on Belgian terrorism charges, was found guilty of \"genocide\" for his role from 2014 onwards in an IS campaign to exterminate the minority group.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was also found guilty of \"crimes against humanity\" for the rape and sexual enslavement of Yazidi women.\n<\/p>\n
\n Two of Djedou's Yazidi victims testified about their ordeal at the trial.\n<\/p>\n
\n Olivia Venet, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, called the case \"historic\" for Belgium -- the country that provided the most foreign fighters to IS per head of population.\n<\/p>\n
\n Other countries in Europe have already prosecuted those accused of genocide against the Yazidis.\n<\/p>\n
\n A Swedish court in February sentenced a 52-year-old woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges for keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority who practise a pre-Islamic faith, had primarily settled in northern Iraq before suffering mass persecution by IS from August 2014.\n<\/p>\n
\n Thousands fled as the jihadists launched brutal attacks in a campaign that UN investigators have qualified as genocide.\n<\/p>\n
\n According to the United Nations, thousands of Yazidi women and girls were subjected to rape, abduction, and inhumane treatment including slavery.\n<\/p>\n
\n Born in Brussels in August 1989 to a Belgian mother and Ivorian father, Djedou converted to Islam at age 15 and left for Syria in October 2012 to join IS, according to the investigators.\n<\/p>\n
\n He is later believed to have become a senior figure in the group's external operations unit, tasked with planning attacks in Europe.\n<\/p>\n
\n In 2021, he was sentenced in Belgium to 13 years in prison for leading a terrorist group.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was also targeted in a 2022 trial into support networks behind the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris that claimed 130 lives. He was convicted in that case but received no prison sentence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Brussels court on Thursday found a Belgian jihadist -- presumed killed in a 2016 airstrike -- guilty of genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria. Sammy Djedou, a former fighter with the Islamic State (IS) group, was reported by the Pentagon to have been killed in Raqqa, Syria. Belgian authorities never received […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-152211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n